Is there a commonly used dataset for benchmarking ray tracing? I know about the BART for dynamic tracing, but is there something widely used for static scenes? Preferably a model-only, not compileable code to run on 'any' machine. The reason I ask is that I am (for a hobby) developing a dedicated hardware ray tracer in an FPGA. It is definitely not real time, and there is no API to program it yet. It does BVH tree iteration in hardware, intersects triangles and shading (shadow, reflection, refraction etc). Currently no texturing but that is on the to-do list.

The current prototype runs at 33 MHz, and is able to trace the 'Fairyforest' scene at about 1 FPS in 256x256 resolution (diffuse lighting, 1 light, 1 shadow ray per pixel).

I'm not aware of any generally accepted performance test. Performance depends on a lot of factors, BVH building times and quality, traversal speed, resolution, camera transformation, shading complexity, selection / coherence of secondary rays. If you just want to improve one of those, then you don't need a general reference, you can just use your own system and time things before and after.

I'm using lots of different scenes to do internal benchmarking and enhancements, but I would like to compare my hardware (maybe scale up number of cores and core speed) to see how efficient it is compared to other state-of-the-art solutions.